A breezy romance that may appeal to fans of Jodi Thomas or Anna Schmidt.
In Reede’s (Blinked, 2017) romance, a woman fighting to save her land from a developer finds herself attracted to the developer’s lawyer.
Ferina Kincaid is a rancher who loves her family’s spread in Brewster County in West Texas. However, she’s struggling to keep the place afloat during a lengthy drought; to make matters more complicated, her boyfriend, Wayne, is cheating on her. Lance Morrison, her neighbor, wants to purchase the land and build a huge department store on it, but Ferina is unwilling to sell. Lance hires Houston lawyer Nolan Anderson to locate her estranged brother, Frank, hoping he can convince Frank to contest his father’s will and sell his share of the land. Nolan and his twin sister, Nadia, arrive in Brewster County expecting an uncomplicated case, but they develop some unexpected connections. Nadia begins dating Ferina’s friend Dwight White, and Nolan develops an interest in Ferina. She’s understandably wary of his intentions but soon finds herself falling in love with him. Nolan tries to ensure that Ferina receives a fair deal, but then Frank surfaces, and a series of mysterious events threaten the ranch. Soon, Ferina and Nolan wonder if their relationship can survive the chaos. The latest from Reede is an entertaining contemporary romance that offers likable characters, well-developed settings, and a generous dose of Southern charm. Ferina and Nolan are strong protagonists whose relationship grounds a multilayered plot. The supporting characters are equally well-drawn, especially Wayne and Frank. The setting is a central element of the story, and Reede creates a vivid portrait of Brewster County that not only includes Ferina’s beloved ranch, but also the Dixie Diner, a popular local restaurant. That said, the editing can be inconsistent at times; Wayne’s last name is“McKellen” and “McClellan” at different points, and legendary singer Billie Holiday is identified as “Billy Holiday.”
A breezy romance that may appeal to fans of Jodi Thomas or Anna Schmidt.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62694-619-4
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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